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As society shifts towards an increasingly sustainable future, high-performance buildings can provide a means to meet sustainability and energy efficiency goals. Occupants in high-performance buildings are often expected to interact with building systems to maintain individual levels of comfort and productivity. However, the critical role of the human-building interface is often ignored (Day & Heschong, 2016). Too often, building controls are not intuitive and poorly understood by typical users. Conversely, some buildings rely on entirely automated building systems (e.g. lighting, shading, HVAC systems), which take control away from occupants. This approach is largely unpopular with building occupants. The literature suggests people desire and prefer control of their interior environments (e.g., Escuyer & Fontoynont, 2001). Designing a high-performance building that effectively engages users presents a more complex problem than most designers are prepared to handle.
Design teams require an ability to see the whole situation—from how the parts of the system work to how users will engage and adapt the system. This ability relies on systematic efforts to understand broad swaths of human behavior and design research, which go beyond computation or modeling (e.g., Huppatz, 2015; Rittel & Webber, 1973). In this context, design and design research supports third order (activities and processes) and fourth order (environments, organizations, and systems) design problems (Buchanan, 1999). Creating design teams, who can comprehend a whole situation, requires reframing how clients and designers understand design problems. This draft paper links theory about design problems with practical processes for using design research to improve the human-building interface.

Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design partnered with Cognizant Technology Solutions on a design project for a semester-long elective course called UX Design Tools. The intent was broad in its inception: identify emergent opportunities where technology will play a significant role in people's interactions and experiences. What is the future of physical space? How are advancements in IoT, augmented reality, and telematics influencing how we experience environments?
Students were asked to anchor their problem solving in evolving human needs and to understand the role technology plays. Cognizant's human-centered development approach relies primarily on ethnographic inquiry. This evidenced through integrating their anthropologists from acquired firm Idea Couture, and associates from strategic partner ReD Associates. The interdisciplinary majors from upper-level undergraduate to graduate level students learned to use and create multi- method research approaches to identify unique opportunities.
Seven teams created future scenarios with newly developed physical product designs, digital interfaces, and new service strategies utilizing various technologies. Three case studies highlight a trio of observed emotional themes in relation to how people utilize technology to benefit their daily life or work: self-
election, introduction-exchange, and co-dependency.
This poster presentation will showcase three projects that will serve as examples of how industry and academia act as research and development entities; how to approach research as a
fundamental tenet for innovation and design; and show how breadth and depth of interdisciplinary skills and experience is a necessity in an ever expanding climate of technology push.

Smart home is becoming a focus in both literature and product development practices. The current study employed a human-centered design approach to understand users desires and expectations from their living context. Six critical themes were developed via in-deep interview, field observation, and data analysis. They are house as a supportive friend, atmosphere generator, theme songs for every moment, coordinator and reminder, life memory collector, and routine builder for young generations. Those concepts were partially integrated to define the value proposition for the target user group of parents with young children. This guides the design ideation and video prototyping to illustrator the user experiences. Through a focus group discussion, the design concepts were validated with six potential customers. The results also show that the design concept has the potential to motivate children’s behaviors, help to build their routine, and has the flexibility to fulfill different needs toward the changes of the family’s life cycle.

The deterioration of linguistic abilities is a natural phenomenon along with aging. Therefore, various assessment tools have been developed to measure linguistic abilities of seniors and diagnose
degenerative diseases such as dementia. Although most of the tools are composed of images, there are not many studies focusing on the visual design, which could significantly affect performance of the subject. In this regard, this research aims to suggest a design guideline for linguistic ability assessment tools concerning the key characteristics of the elderly, focusing on visual contents and interface.
Existing related researches were mostly conducted in English speaking countries. In order to assess the language processing abilities of Korean-speaking elders more accurately, it is necessary to develop language processing assessment tools that reflect the unique linguistic features and structure of the Korean language. Regarding the existing tools, there is a lack of research on aging, focusing on ‘verb naming.
In the literature review section, the paper investigated the physical, cognitive and emotional characteristics of the elderly and extracted the key elements to consider when designing for the elderly. Also, design principles were found based on case studies and problem analysis of the existing assessment tools for language processing abilities. Lastly, we created a prototype model using ‘verb naming.’ Using the model, we have conducted an experiment and comparative analysis between different age groups to verify the validity of contents.
In conclusion, we provided a design guideline for visual contents and interface of linguistic assessment tools, focusing on elderly users.

Western cultures focus on salient objects and use categorization for purposes of organizing the environment (an analytic view), whereas, East Asians cultures focus more holistically on relationships and similarities among objects when organizing the environment (a holistic view). Previous research has shown that cognitive approaches differ between cultures: European Americans prefer an analytic style, and East Asians tend to use a holistic style. However, little is known about how cultural differences in cognition relate to aesthetic preferences. In this paper, we explored whether cultural differences arise in preferences for products set in matching vs. mismatching contexts. Participants in a laboratory experiment included European Americans and East Asians. Individually, they viewed images of a variety of furniture products (chairs, coffee tables, and floor lamps) and rated their aesthetic appeal. Each product type appeared in three different contexts: matching (target product shown in its usual in-home context); mismatched (target product shown in an unusual in-home context), and neutral (the target product shown on a white background). For both cultural groups, products were judged to be more aesthetically pleasing in the matching than in the mismatched context. However, ratings for products in mismatching contexts were significantly higher among East Asians. Our findings suggest that those with holistic views (East Asians) are more tolerant of mismatches than are those with more analytic views (European Americans). The implications for product and marketing design include greater attention to context presentation.

Learning pressure affects students’ learning process and performance. Industrial design education emphasizes that operations on real design problems that have heavy working loads may cause learning pressure. The purpose of this study is to explore the issues causing learning pressure and the pressure management strategies of undergraduate industrial design students. There were 297 students who participated in the questionnaire survey. The main findings are as follows: First, learning pressure includes academic pressure, peer pressure, self-expectations, time pressure, financial pressure, pressure from instructors, external pressure, future career, pressure from parents, resource pressure, achievement, and situational pressure. In addition, the main learning pressure is caused by finance, time, resources, external issues, and future career. Second, the pressure management strategies include problem solving, procrastination and escape, help seeking, leisure, emotional management, and self-adjustment. The most useful strategy for managing pressure is leisure, and procrastination and escape is the least useful strategy. Third, all learning pressures are significantly correlated with procrastination and escape strategy, but the coefficients are low. The results can be a reference for industrial design education and related research.

Designing successful products and services that people like, requires an understanding of the context and the aspirations of those people. Over the past decade, a range of methods has been developed to help designers gain such empathy. These have worked well when designer and target user share a cultural context. However, designers often find it difficult to empathize with the user insights of individuals from a culture beyond their first-hand experience. To help designers step beyond this limitation, those user insights need to be placed in a larger understanding of the cultural context. In this paper, we present Cultura: a toolkit that uses nine cultural aspects based on cultural models, informing designers about user insights in a broader cultural context. The toolkit was evaluated in design sessions with four design teams. The findings indicate that Cultura provides inspiration and motivation for designers to gain empathic insights into users beyond their own cultural boundaries and to make effective designs for people.

Developing successful RNPs can bring competitive advantages for companies. However, the success rate of RNPs are relatively low because consumers often feel resistant to adopt
them. One reason for consumers’ resistance is their lack of comprehension of RNPs. To facilitate consumers’ comprehension, this paper conceptually discusses the opportunities related to designing the appearances of RNPs. More specifically, to facilitate consumers’ internal and external learning, this paper explores four underlying mechanisms: 1) product appearance as a visual cue to trigger category-based knowledge transfer, 2) to trigger analogy-based knowledge transfer, 3) product appearance as an information carrier to communicate innovative functionality directly, and 4) product appearance as a way to trigger congruity with innovative functionality of RNPs. The rationales for each underlying
mechanism are conceptually discussed, supported with relevant empirical evidence and examples found in the markets.

High-stakes testing that became the norm after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 helped condition students to strive for correct answers for clear problems, all on the first try. However, the iterative process inherent in designing requires risk-taking to conduct a trial-and-error process of defining problems and exploring possible solutions. This design research project was operated with Miami University Graphic Design students to test their willingness to take risks in their coursework to achieve their self-defined measures of success. Students identified that improving their skills was how they defined success. An interaction design assignment involving front-end coding was modified to test students’ comfort taking risks to grow their skills. Most students took risks in the assignment to grow their interaction design skills. The project revealed that closer attention to student motivation when developing learning experiences could help students make the transition to practicing design as an iterative process fraught with risk.

From the 1980s, design thinking has emerged in companies as a method for practical and creative problem solving, based on designers’ way of thinking, integrated into a rational and iterative model to accompany the process. In companies, design thinking helped valuing creative teamwork, though not necessarily professional designers’ expertise. By pointing out two blind spots in design thinking models, as currently understood and implemented, this paper aims at shedding light on two rarely described traits of designers’ self. The first relies in problem framing, a breaking point that deeply escapes determinism. The second blind spot questions the post project process. We thus seek to portray designers’ singularity, in order to stimulate critical reflection and encourage the opening-up to design culture. Companies and organizations willing to make the most of designers’ expertise would gain acknowledging their critical heteronomy to foster innovation based on strong and disruptive visions, beyond an out-of-date problem solving approach to design.

In the past decades, universities’ involvement in socio-economic development, which goes along with their teaching and researching activities, has defined a new role for them in society’s ecosystem. This new role is often referred with the term of “entrepreneurial” university, whose objectives are positive societal, economic and environmental impacts. In order to fulfil such objectives, entrepreneurial universities might engage in cross-sector collaborations with external organisations. Despite the great contributions that cross-sector collaboration can give to the partners involved, the outcome is mostly unfocussed and rarely embedded. This paper explores the outcome embedding in the cross-sector collaboration between entrepreneurial universities and the private sector. To this end, we provide the case of the collaboration between a Dutch airline company and four Dutch entrepreneurial research and teaching institutions. We aim to uncover hindering and enabling factors to the outcome embedding in order to design an interaction platform, design it together. This platform will be a tool to encourage the outcome embedding, moving from being inspired by to the actual implementation of the cross-sector collaboration. In order to fulfill this goal, this study employs a research through design methodology. This approach is a generative process, where cyclic loops of iterations and evaluations with stakeholders tend to the research goal. The solution is a digital platform, co-created with all stakeholders. This study can inspire practitioners and future research on the problem of unsuccessful cross-sector collaborations, between entrepreneurial universities and external organisations, with more emphasis on the value of embedding and translating the outcomes.

The purpose of Experience Group Sessions is to identify the health and lifestyle challenges that make it difficult for patients and families to manage chronic medical conditions. The Innovation Engine at Carolinas HealthCare System worked with pediatricians to identify and recruit patients with chronic asthma. Experience Group Sessions were a way for families and patients to share their experiences managing asthma and allowed facilitators to gather insights about what does and does not happen in their daily lives. The key themes and quotes collected from the Experience Group Sessions were grouped into three categories of outcomes that define success with health: capability, comfort and calm. The results of the analysis were shared with the workgroup to inform the design and strategy for an integrated practice unit. Integrated practice units are intended to bring together a full range of providers and services to specifically address a certain medical condition, in this case, pediatric asthma at Carolinas HealthCare System. This integrated practice model will be reorganized around patient-centered care and value to improve overall health for children with asthma.

Effective university-industry collaboration has become a major focus for governments in recent years. Universities are increasingly expected to play a greater role in the innovation system and evidence their contribution to economic development. At the same time, the growth in research quality assessment exercises makes it imperative that the excellence of research conducted in commercially-driven activities can be appropriately evaluated. This paper explores the challenge of reconciling commercially-focused activity and research quality assessment in design. Semi- structured interviews were conducted with thirteen experts including representatives from the design discipline, other applied academic disciplines, research quality assessment leaders and commercial designers. The interviews identified a number of barriers to demonstrating research excellence in commercially-driven projects. These were classified as barriers resulting from: the nature of industry/academic relationships; the nature of the project; and the nature of the research quality assessment. It is concluded that there is a need to build a simple, easily usable framework for assessing the research potential of commercially-driven design projects from the outset to ensure that the appropriate processes are put in place to communicate research conducted within them.

When design works with industry it tries to sell two things, first, selling design as an agent of transformation, and second, selling design as a skill. Whilst historically design has been successful in the latter, it is the former that is more challenging, making it a necessity for design to work in none design contexts in order to build trust and credibility. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the ways in which design interacts with industry, and how these interactions enable design to establish longer term relationships.
This investigation set out to answer the question, what design specific characteristics are applied to establish successful longer-term relationships between design and industry? The paper aims to illustrate the intrinsic factors that enable design to get access, and designers to get authority to play a significant role in organisations. Five well-established relationships between design and industry have been used to analyse to find correlations.
The investigation identifies three stages of collaboration between design and industry, namely, involvement, collaboration and partnerships, contrary to Cahill’s (1965) theoretical model, which claimed four stages to long lasting partnerships. Also, the case studies confirm three stages of trust and credibility as factors that help in strengthening a relationship between design and industry. Finally, several intrinsic factors that are unique to design have been identified, which are seen to have helped design in building high levels of trust and credibility.

Most academic methodologies are developed from a prescribed methodological process that is limited to a specific area of study. However, the disciplinary landscape in which the knowledge is established is being rapidly reconfigured. Given the vast varieties of practices and knowledge base required from information designers, it is even more crucial for them to look outside of the traditional visual design fields and seek diversities for better research and creation methods.
The two disciplines, software engineering and information design, are often perceived as one provides technical solutions to the other. This essay intends to move beyond the common perception, and identify relevant issues in software engineering design that resonate with the information design process. The issues include the multi-component planning approach; the human-oriented agile method; design concepts such as abstraction, decomposition, component modularity, hierarchical relationship, and extensibility. The perspectives from software engineering design and information design is examined through units of analysis, terminology explanations, and forms of communications. The collective design methods and principles provide a systematic framework to the methodological thinking in information design. The discussion serves the purpose of encouraging more conceptual-based conversations between information design and other disciplines, especially in the fields of science and technology.

Futures techniques have long been used in large enterprises as designerly means to explore the future and guide innovation. In the automotive industry, for instance, the development of concept cars is a technique which has repeatedly proven its value. However, while big companies have broadly embraced futures techniques, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have lagged behind in applying them, largely because they are too resource- intensive and poorly suited to the SMEs’ needs and idiosyncrasies. To address this issue, we developed DIVE: Design, Innovation, Vision, and Exploration, a design-led futures technique for SMEs. Its development began with an inquiry into concept cars in the automotive industry and concept products and services in other industries. We then combined the insights derived from these design practices with elements of the existing techniques of critical design and design fiction into the creation of DIVE’s preliminary first version, which was then applied and evaluated in two iterations with SMEs, resulting in DIVE’s alpha version. After both iterations in context, it seems that DIVE suits the SMEs because of its compact and inexpensive activities which emphasize making and storytelling. Although the results of these activities might be less flashy than concept cars, these simple prototypes and videos help SMEs internalize and share a clear image of a preferable future, commonly known as vision. Developing DIVE thus helped us explore how design can support SMEs in envisioning the future in the context of innovation.

Two German pioneers of sensory development education, Christof Drexel (1886-1979) and Hugo Kükelhaus (1900-1984) pursued methodical investigations into perceptual principles of cognition and design in order to discover the ways in which aesthetic principles can develop and guide sensory response. Drexel and Kükelhaus traveled parallel investigative paths, both merging formal aesthetic practices with perceptual psychology. It was not until 1950, when these visionary thinkers finally met in person, that they joined forces to present their discoveries which determined that experiences are momentary intersections between internal and external realities, and are intrinsically intertwined in the deepest levels of consciousness, publicly. Both Drexel and Kükelhaus believed in the value of using the senses as pedagogy and that they should be integrated into every level of education. Correspondence between Drexel and Kükelhaus after 1950 illuminates the theoretical paths and applicative forms generated through the interplay of experimental psychology and applied aesthetic practice. This paper provides insights into the artistic and scientific dynamics based on Drexel’s examination of archetypical imagery and the psychic line, and the sensory development applications designed by Kükelhaus.

This study suggests that student reflection on academic and industry collaborative projects can enhance student’s understanding on the design process to solve live industry problems. It contributes to the body of design literature to support students learning of explicit and implicit knowledge (Boling et al., 2016; Land et al., 2016; Salama, 2015). A 2017 learning- by-making (LBM) unit in the School of Architecture and Design, at the University of Tasmania, Australia, developed a unit for students to collaborate with Neville Smith Forest Products Pty. Ltd. (NSFP). NSFP is a local Tasmanian timber product manufacturer who currently stockpiles out-of-grade timber that has limited market applications. Undergraduate design students from second and third year Furniture, Interior and Architecture degrees collaborated with NSFP to value-add to their out-of-grade resource in the LBM unit. A series of design challenges, observations of industry practice and access to out-of-grade timber from NSFP exposed students to live industry problems and provided them the opportunity to build professional design skills. Students reflected on the collaborative LBM unit in a reflection journal, which was used to provide evidence of their learning experiences. The collaborative environment between academia and industry allowed students to acquire an understanding of timber product manufacturing that helped them develop empathy towards the industry problem and influence the development of new products. This study presents how student reflections influenced a change in their design process as they progressed through sequential design challenges to address an industry problem by adopting Valkenburg and Dorst (1998) reflective learning framework.

Low-seated chairs for tatami mats that are characteristic of Japanese-style interior appeared after late 1940s. This article focuses on the ambivalence between Western lifestyles and Japanese lifestyles by tracing the comments of designers, critics, magazines, and so forth to clarify a background of them. The introduction of chairs in Japan was actually involved, by definition, in a dichotomy between sitting on the floor and in chairs, which therefore was far from the domestic practicality of lifestyles among the public. Then we have to observe the two points for the introduction of chairs to break through this rigid situation: (1) how did the public establish definition of chairs outside the Westernization? This article grasps the fact that the artisans and early designers accumulated their experience of producing chairs from scratch, through trial and error. (2) How did the relation between sitting on the floor and in chairs break out of the dichotomy, through ambivalence? This article focuses on the fact that the public enjoyed the physical relaxation offered by the mix of sitting on the floor and in chairs. This constituted the domestic practicality of chairs for the Japanese. Therefore, such experiences of making and using chairs can be summarized as the awakening of a universe in the distance between the floor and the seat-height of Western chairs. It was a new frontier for Japanese designers, and low-seated chairs were born in this space. This article concludes that it marked the transition from Westernization to Japanese modern design.

This paper engages with the literature to present different perspectives between forecasting
and foresight in strategic design, while drawing insights derived from futures studies that
can be applied in form of a design-inspired foresight approach for designers and
interdisciplinary innovation teams increasingly called upon to help envisage preferable
futures. Demonstrating this process in applied research, relevant examples are drawn from
a 2016 Financial Services industry futures study to the year 2030. While the financial
services industry exemplifies an ideal case for design-inspired foresight, the aims of this
paper are primarily to establish the peculiarities between traditional forecasting
applications and a design-inspired foresight visioning approach as strategic design
activities for selecting preferable futures. Underlining the contribution of this paper is the
value of design futures thinking as a creative and divergent thought process, which has the
potential to respond to the much broader organizational reforms needed to sustain in
today’s rapidly evolving business environment (Buchanan, 2015; Irmak, 2005; Muratovski,
2016).